Poor laws tightened whenever divorce or emancipation threatened to shift welfare costs onto states

Evidence

These laws were continually reinvigorated and embellished to adapt to what we might call periodic episodes of sexual revolution. That is, at each historical juncture where the legal obligations of family were somehow weakened or threatened by the generalization of divorce, the waning importance of marriage, or the liberation of slaves who had never been married, the poor laws would be reinforced to punish those who threatened to transfer the costs of their welfare onto the state. As divorce became more common in the nineteenth century, the poor laws were modified to require post-divorce child support. When slaves were enfranchised in the 1860s, they were immediately encouraged to enter formal marriages and were subsequently subject to new legal rules of family support and mutual dependence. In many instances, those who failed to comply with family responsibility rules of economic obligation were subject to criminal sanctions such as forced labor or imprisonment. The poor laws helped the state to contain the costs of evolving sexual mores by imposing marital and familial support as an economic obligation. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 217

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the ADDENDUM article on sumptuary and moral-panic law reacting to shifts in identity/class signaling. — connects to: Poor laws were repeatedly strengthened to punish threats to family-based welfare — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 217
• SEED: Angle: ‘the state’s welfare ledger as a driver of moral regulation’ — tracing how fiscal exposure, not morality, produced support-enforcement law.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that states tightened kin-support law at each moment family obligation loosened reveals welfare-cost-containment, not morality, as the engine of family regulation — a dense reframing worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• Poor laws were repeatedly strengthened to punish threats to family-based welfare #corroborates (0.95) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 217